A prophetic genius finally has his day

Karl Kraus's epic war play The Last Days of Mankind is, believes
Niall Ferguson
, the greatest drama written this century. So why has it had to wait 77 years for its English premiere?

12:00AM GMT 18 Dec 1999

IT is not entirely surprising that England has had to wait until the last days of the 20th century to enjoy Karl Kraus's play The Last Days of Mankind. Written between 1915 and 1922, it did not receive its German premiere until 1964, 50 years after the outbreak of the war that inspired it, and nearly 30 years after the author's death. Kraus himself said it was designed for a theatre on Mars, and not only on account of its immense length (more than 200 scenes) and technical difficulties. Name one other play that requires 1,200 horses to trot out of the sea in the wake of a singing flame-thrower.

Yet (provided Kraus's stage directions are not taken literally), The Last Days is no harder to stage than Wagner's Ring cycle, another immense German-language masterpiece with an apocalyptic climax. It is also a great deal funnier. And to my mind this extraordinary play is a work of genius every bit as imposing as Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. It is certainly the greatest dramatic satire of the 20th century. I would go so far as to call it the greatest drama.

This weekend's BBC radio production by the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre dates back to the Edinburgh Festival of 1983. That incarnation remains the most electrifying theatrical experience I have ever had. Now, more than 16 years on, those unlucky enough to have missed it on stage can hear Robert David MacDonald's inspired translation with a similar if not stronger cast, once again under Giles Havergal's masterly direction.

Why devote four hours (condensed from 15) to the work of a Viennese writer hardly anyone in this country has heard of? To begin with, because this is one of the great works of anti-war literature, on a par with All Quiet on the Western Front. What makes it quite different from Remarque's novel is that Kraus was a civilian. Though there are numerous front-line scenes in the play, this is the war as seen from the home front - in the coffee houses of Habsburg Vienna. And, unexpectedly, this proves to be as good a vantage point as the trenches. After all, without the civilians, this first total war could not have been sustained.

Kraus's main aim is to expose the warmongers: not only the posturing generals and the profiteering industrialists but also - above all - the purveyors of propaganda: the press.

For Kraus, the First World War was the first media war, and its grotesque ironies at once fascinate and appal him. Thus, newsreel of the sinking of the Lusitania is preceded in cinemas by the announcement: "Smoking permitted at this point in the programme." Today, "you could not make it up" has become a tired catch-phrase. Kraus was the first satirist to realise that such absurdities did not need to be invented. The most surreal scenes turn out to be straight quotations.

In a cast of hundreds, the key villain of The Last Days of Mankind is Alice Schalek, the war correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse. To Schalek, battles are no different from the plays she reviewed in peacetime: "performances" at the Front are "first-class" and officers are interviewed as if they were stars of the stage. Schalek herself takes a turn with a gun and finds it especially "interesting" when (as she has been warned) the enemy returns fire. So damning is Kraus's portrayal that, when the play was first published, Schalek sued; indeed, her brother challenged him to a duel.

Throughout the play, Kraus shows how journalistic language glosses over the realities of war and thereby helps perpetuate it. But he goes further. The war, he suggests, is actually a consequence of the power of the press.

"Would the war have been possible at all without the press?" he asks. "We were crippled by the newspaper printing presses before the cannons claimed their first victims . . . The war guilt of the press is not that it set the machinery of death in motion, but that it hollowed out our hearts so that we could no longer imagine what it was going to be like."

Worse, the press is only acting in its own interest. As one journalist declares: "The public must have its appetite whetted for the war and for the paper, one is inseparable for the other." Crowds cheer "for Austria, Germany and the Neue Freie Presse". "Are those our men?" one reporter near the front line asks another. "You mean from the press corps?" replies the other.

Not only does this show that Kraus was some years ahead of more famous critics of the mass media such as Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan. It also reminds us that the power of the press is no recent development (nor the enthusiasm of newspapers for wars). In a year when American troops could time their advances into Kosovo to coincide with prime-time news on CNN, The Last Days of Mankind emerges as a work of prophecy as well as satire.

Incidentally, what Kraus said about the Austrian press was also true in this country. "What sells a newspaper?" one of Northcliffe's editors had been asked before the war. "The first answer is 'war'." He was right. The circulation of the Daily Mail soared from 945,000 before the war to just under 1.5 million during the first weeks of August 1914 and remained at 1.4 million until June 1916. The circulation of The Times more than doubled.

Kraus called The Last Days a "fissured" play. It is also a work of personal and global transformation. A five-act tragedy with a strong Shakespearean influence (most obvious towards the end), it is also an Expressionist kaleidoscope, a photomontage for the stage. The transition from 1914 to 1918 is also the transition from cavalry charges to industrialised slaughter and (audibly, in Radio 3's production) from The Blue Danube to Rhapsody in Blue.

There is a political transition at work too; for during the seven years it took him to write it, Kraus gradually abandoned his pre-war conservatism in favour of republicanism and even socialism. The passages written towards the end of the war include a distinctly Marxist critique of what would later be known as "the military-industrial complex".

Nevertheless, the play's main preoccupation remains the perversion of language; and to this end he cannot resist supplementing his "actual quotations" with the occasional good gag. "What's it like out there?" a non-combatant asks a friend back from the Front. "Simply killing," comes the reply. "But it's a living."

Kraus's masterpiece has no counterpart in the English language. The 1960s musical Oh! What a Lovely War is crass by comparison, and MacDonald's translation of Kraus should replace it for good and all. What is more, a modern production of the play can do something Kraus himself could not. It can show - as this production does in its terrifying, hypnotic finale - the prescience of his forebodings about germ warfare and Star Wars.

If ever there was a time to appreciate the prophetic genius of The Last Days of Mankind, it must surely be the last month of the last year of mankind's most bloody century.

The Last Days of Mankind will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 this Saturday and next Sunday. Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War is available from our retail partner, Amazon, at the special price of £7.99. Click here to order a copy online.